A Visit from the Smithsonian Institution’s Director of Research and Scientific Data Management

Last week the Curation and Preservation Services department of MIT Libraries had the pleasure of hosting Thornton “Thorny” Staples from the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Research Information Services. Although he claims to be a curmudgeon, Thorny is actually a very friendly digital library pioneer with experience creating innovative solutions for a wide variety of digital collections challenges.

On this visit, he gave library staff an overview of the Smithsonian Institution’s SIdora research data management tool. This tool is an interactive system to help the Smithsonian’s many researchers capture and manage their data along with its context. The data is managed in a trusted repository where it can be shared and re-used by other scholars, and ultimately archived by the Smithsonian’s curators. The project is currently in development, but Thorny gave a demonstration of the tool’s pilot instance and it was already easy to see how much great functionality it will have. We look forward to seeing the tool and its output as development progresses.

Many thanks to Thorny for visiting us here in Cambridge and giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the SIdora reposoitory!